Guide

How to Make the Most of Your Weekend Hike

3,300 minutes. That’s the amount of time available from 5pm Friday to midnight on Sunday. The 55 hours you have to spend on a weekend often seems to race by and those plans to get outside can easily get scrapped. This is a blog aimed at making the most of your weekend outdoors by motivating, preparing and executing the perfect weekend hiking trip.

What’s your hike?

There’s more than one way to get outside and hike at the weekend. Depending on the time you have available, your experience and what you want to get out of it, you have several weekend hiking options:

The Microadventure – Coined by Alistair Humphreys, the Microadventure is in essence “short, local and cheap”. It’s all about getting outside in a time poor world and making the most of it. Anyone can do it. Just escape to a local forest, countryside or even a field and pitch a tent. You can mix in a few hours of hiking around your camp to make this trip more active and even more adventurous

The Day Hike – Look up your local routes on the internet. There are a wealth of resources available which give you short to medium length day hikes in your local area. You can spend anywhere between 4-8 hours on circular or point to point trails

The Multi-day Hike – It’s not hard to find a multi-day hiking route near you. They’re all around us. You can pick a segment of a long hiking route near you and head out for a hike and camp trip over a weekend. These take more time but offer a wilder, more challenging experience

Get Excited

After a long week at work it’s tempting to hit the sofa and make the most of the Netflix autoplay feature. Don’t do it! Getting outside for a hike can reset those batteries and, in some cases, leave you with more energy than when you started. You just need to get excited:

Plan your route – By planning your route, looking at distances and time spent hiking you can build a real picture of the sort of hiking weekend you’re going to have. This is a great way to build the excitement for the weekend

Research – Looking up some new and interesting locations is a great way to get motivated. Spend an evening browsing points of interest on your hiking route. You could even learn about some of the local wildlife that lives around you

Challenge yourself – Setting challenges and objectives can add another dimension to your hike. Do you want to learn some map reading skills? Maybe you want to increase your daily hiking distance? Maybe you want to learn to cook in the wild? There are plenty of safe and achievable challenges for you to set

Get Prepared

Preparation is key to getting the most out of your weekend hiking trip. Be it a single or multi-day hiking trip, there are some simple steps you can take to get ready:

Which pack should I carry? – Different hiking styles require different Hiking Packs. Our guide to pack selection can help with this

Pull together a checklist – Preparing your kit and writing a list will ensure you have everything you need for your trip. Will you be hiking in bad weather? How will this affect your kit? Are you camping over night? How much food will you need? Take a look at our 7 hiking life hacks for more tips!

Grab a map – An important part of hiking preparation is having the tools to navigate. If you’re going to be spending some time on a trail then picking up a map is both useful but also advised